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September-October 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 These critiques had, I felt, considerable force, but their weakness was their inability to register the aesthetic dimension—of sports or of art—as anything but a screen, an ideological cover for something else. My overarching strategy, I decided, would be fairly simple: I would at least obliquely rehearse the theoretical objections to Gumbrecht’s book, objections centered on rival sociological and psychological accounts of sports, and then I would assert the validity, even within such a framework, of the aesthetic claim. I would not argue that this claim had priority, but I would refuse to let it disappear altogether into functionalism. Yes, being a sports fan is not pure aesthetic appreciation: it is deeply enmeshed, as Bourdieu and others could easily show, in social, psychic, economic, and political strategies. But, if the aesthetic dimension that Gumbrecht praises is ignored, it is difficult even to understand these strategies or to grasp why they are attached to this set of human activities and not another. A short Festschrift essay was hardly the occasion to grapple directly with these arguments. I tried to think how I could amuse myself and at the same time do something slightly unexpected with the genre of the celebratory essay. I decided to write about Gumbrecht’s book and its critics almost entirely indirectly, by describing an event in my life, an occasion whose nature I had grossly misunderstood. Here is what I wrote: Sepp gumbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006) came along about fifty years too late for it to have had the practical effect on my life that it might have had: namely, to have gotten me into Harvard. My parents passionately wanted me to go there: the children of poor immigrants, they regarded Harvard with something like awe. As for me, growing up in the vicinity of Cambridge, Massachusetts, I imbibed with everyone else the conviction that it was an immensely desirable fate. I was near the top of my large graduating class in high school, quite good at standardized tests, and frenetically busy in activities like the literary magazine, the drama club, and the newspaper, so I at least stood a chance to be admitted, but no one in my world had a clue how the whole admissions business worked. My older brother Marty was commuting to Brandeis, but he wasn’t happy there and had no advice to give me. Neither of my parents had gone to college, nor (with a single exception) had my many aunts and uncles, so there was virtually no family lore, and though my high school had a few guidance counselors, they did little more than urge the students to apply to a “safety school” or two. There was certainly nothing equivalent to the professionals that some parents now hire to “package” their children for college applications, a practice that recently made the news in a charge of plagiarism brought against a gifted Harvard undergraduate who had published a popular “chick-lit” novel that bore a suspicious resemblance to another novel in the same genre. The parents of the undergraduate in question turned out to have employed such a professional to help their daughter gain admission. The packager remarked casually, when she was interviewed, that the parents had not chosen the most expensive option—the Platinum service costing something like $30,000—but had opted for somewhat less elaborate assistance. I suppose, looking back at the 1950s, that there were such services, after a fashion, but they were simply called prep schools, whose students stood a much better chance to satisfy whatever it was that the admissions officers were looking for. In any case, places like Exeter or Choate were far outside my parents’ ken or their wishes, not to mention my own. Since public education was free (and in my town quite good), they would have regarded the cost of private school as what they obsessively called, in Yiddish, “aroysgevorfene gelt,” that is, money thrown away. And, after all, students were regularly admitted to Harvard from my high school, so my parents were not wrong. Since I was applying to Harvard from the Boston area, I was expected to have an interview, and my parents grew increasingly apprehensive. “Stevie, put down that book. You’ll ruin your eyes,” they would constantly nag at me. Usually, their urgings were an invitation to watch television with them on the little black-and-white set of which they were so proud. But as the date for the interview approached, their words were more often the earnest prelude to what they conceived of as a strategy session. The interviewer doesn’t want to see an “egghead,” my father would say, looking askance at whatever it was I was reading—Everyman or Anna Karenina or Camus’s The Stranger; “he wants to see a regular fella, someone who doesn’t always have his nose buried in books.” “Well, what should I talk about, Dad?” I asked. It wasn’t as if I had had an infinitely thrilling set of experiences on which to draw: I had been taken to Miami Beach once, over Christmas vacation; had visited New York a few times, where I had seen the Rockettes and eaten at the Automat; spent most of my summers with my aunts and uncles and cousins at the beach in Maine. “You have to talk about sports,” my father said. “Whatever you are asked, wherever the conversation seems to be going, bring it back to sports. That’s what the interviewer is looking for.” I have no idea where in his immediate life-world my father’s advice was coming from. He himself was no athlete, and had never been one, though I remember that he would occasionally throw a ball in the backyard to my brother and me and complain that my brother threw “like a girl.” In Maine, he generally stayed out of the water, even when it was steamy, or at most only waded in up to his waist, since he had not learned to swim. He certainly never skied, or picked up a tennis racket, or played golf. And though he was a vigorous walker, I never once saw him actually exercise. And, as for me, though I had learned to swim and to play tennis and though I occasionally played softball at the playground, I hardly had any athletic prowess to speak of, let alone to turn into an intriguing conversational gambit. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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